Baby Love (2 page)

When Rupert told her she should move out she remembers thinking: Now I’m going to find out what it means to have a nervous breakdown. They were on vacation in Florida—Rupert got Trina on vacations—and Trina wanted Rupert to fly a kite with her and he had looked at Ann and said, “I’m too old to go through this all over again.” She remembers bending to pick up her towel, trying to push her foot into her sandal without unbuckling the strap, thinking: In a minute something is going to happen, and waiting, almost curious, to see whether her legs would give out under her or whether she would walk into the water with all her clothes on or straight into the path of one of the cars that are always racing up and down the sand at Daytona. Maybe in a minute she would begin to scream.

But what happened was, she turned in the direction of the hotel, smiled when she passed the woman from Burlington whom she met in the lobby the day before, remembered her room number. Opened the top drawer, with her stack of T-shirts on one side and Trina’s Old Maid deck and jacks on the other side. Packed. When Rupert and Trina came back to the room—not right away, because Trina had wanted to fly her kite some, more—Ann said, “My mother’s sick. I have to go home right away.” Trina said, “You mean you can’t come with us to Disney World?” and Ann said, “I guess not.” There were no more planes that day, so they all had dinner together that night. Nothing special, just the hotel restaurant. Ann thought she would be unable to chew, or to swallow, or that Rupert might suddenly pull the cloth off the table with all the food on it and say, “Surprise, I didn’t mean it.” But they had a normal meal and then they went to the movies—
The Muppet Movie
, which they had seen twice before because it was Trina’s favorite. Rupert still laughed at the part where Kermit rides a bicycle, with his little toothpick legs.

Then they went back to the hotel, put Trina to bed. Ann thought: Now something will happen. She had begun to cry—not uncontrollably, still—and Rupert said, “Trina will hear.” She said, “Then come into the bathroom.” So he sat on the edge of the bathtub and she sat on the toilet and couldn’t think of any of the things she’d been saying to him, in her head, all through the movie. Just please let her stay and she would promise not to interfere with his work anymore, didn’t need to have a baby if he didn’t want one. Just please let her stay. She can remember him leaning toward her and how she thought: Now he’s going to put his arms around me. What he did was, he tore a piece of toilet paper off the roll, folded it over three times and handed it to her. He said, “I hope you didn’t get a sunburn today. Put some aloe on it when you get home.”

All this she can remember very clearly. She plays these scenes over in her head nearly every day, picking out different parts to focus on, saving them for nighttime, usually when she’s in bed. Sometimes she thinks about the flight back to Vermont, dusting the snow off the car, having to empty her purse out in the snow to find his keys. Leaving a little pile of crumbs, a couple of dry roasted peanuts, a couple of seashells lying there for someone to wonder how there would get to be shells in the Burlington airport parking lot in March. Sometimes the scene she focuses on is her and Trina lying in the double bed that night—Rupert said Trina would feel left out if I sleep with you on our vacation. She remembers lying awake all night, just wishing she could be alone and cry, needing to cry the way sometimes, when she was little, she’d need to go to the bathroom during a test. Thinking she might burst. Watching Trina sleep, with her mouth open and a corner of her nightie wound around her thumb. Dreaming about Disney World probably.

What happened after is blurred. Clearing her clothes out of his closet, sorting out her records—Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the song Trina thought was so funny, about a dead skunk—from his shelf full of Glenn Miller and Sinatra. She remembers drawing a picture of herself, naked, in the dust on her bedroom window, trying to picture him finding it, feeling sad.

What she did then was take the money that her father had left her out of the bank and open a checking account. She bought a new red car and a stereo tape player and sixteen cassettes that same afternoon. She drove the U-Haul with her clothes and records to her friend Patsy’s house in Brattleboro, bought six newspapers and circled all the real estate listings that had old houses and land and didn’t cost too much. She spent three weeks driving around Vermont and New Hampshire and upstate New York and then she found a Cape with four fireplaces and twenty-four acres with a brook running through at the end of a dirt road. The real estate agent—a man about Rupert’s age, early fifties—said didn’t she want to consult her parents about this, hire someone to check out the roof and the sills. “Of course I’d like to make the sale,” he said, “but I’ve got a daughter about your age and I sure wouldn’t want her taking on something like this.” Ann had seen her mother only once in the two years since she left college and moved in with Rupert. She would have liked Rupert to see the house, know what she was doing, but she said no, I don’t want to consult anyone, and bought it with cash.

This was a year and a half ago, when she was twenty. She thinks now that she does understand what it means to have a nervous breakdown. It’s not something that happens like a heart attack—nothing so dramatic as walking into the ocean and disappearing. For her it has meant sitting on this couch watching soap operas for eleven months, driving into town every day to buy yogurt and bananas and cheese and raisins and movie magazines and Dolly Parton records and Kahlua and a deluxe Golden Touch sewing machine she’ll never learn how to use, and a loom and a .35-millimeter camera and a ten-speed bike and begonia bulbs and grape vines. She buys plants and then never gets around to planting them. They sit in the wheelbarrow she bought, dropping leaves. Sooner or later they die, and it depresses her, seeing them every day on her way out to the car. So finally she takes them to the dump and then she buys more, and pretty soon they die too.

Mark stands in front of the bathroom mirror holding an imaginary guitar. They’re playing the new Grateful Dead album on the radio without commercials and he’s pretending he’s the bass player. He is not wearing a shirt. He’s so involved in the fingering during this particular song that he doesn’t even see Sandy—who has just put the baby down for a nap—standing in the doorway watching him. “Hamburgers or tuna casserole?” she says.

“Don’t you ever cook something different?” he asks her. “Roast beef or pot roast or something?”

Sandy has in fact planned something different for dinner: harlequin parfaits, from a recipe she saw on the back of a Cool Whip package. She has bought candles and a bottle of Cella Lambrusco. This was supposed to be a surprise.

“Roast beef costs a dollar eighty-nine a pound in case you didn’t notice,” she says. “Your fly’s unzipped. Gross.” He is not wearing shorts. He has plenty in the drawer, of course—ironed. He just likes the way it feels, wearing none.

This isn’t what he thought it was like, being married.

He has no idea when it was, the first time they met. Mark and Sandy were born in this town, their parents belong to the same church, they have simply always known each other. They were Mary and Joseph in the Congregational Christmas pageant one time, and lab partners, years later, in chemistry. Sandy had filled out by then: she was always cute, but around freshman year she also got a figure. Mark would think about lab session all week, worry because his hand trembled while he held the Bunsen burner, that he’d light the curled-under ends of her hair, which is honey blond.

They started dating at the end of sophomore year. The first time they went all the way was a few days after Christmas, junior year. They were baby-sitting for Mark’s older sister Charlene, who has twins. She and Mark’s brother-in-law left four beers in the fridge for them. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Mark’s brother-in-law told Mark, at the door of his car just before they took off. Sandy was back in the house, waiting for one of the babies to burp.

She didn’t hear him come back into the house. He had taken off his shoes so he wouldn’t track in snow. Came up behind her very quietly, and she was singing to the baby. She was only sixteen then, but already she looked like a mother.

The truth is (Mark doesn’t like to think about this), Sandy has never turned Mark on as much as some other girls, though she’s the only one he ever loved. When he would lie in bed alone and think about fucking he would picture one of the cheap girls in school, like Candy Patenaude, who didn’t wear underpants, or Joyce Munson, who’s pretty ugly. “Mouth like a cunt,” one of the guys on the basketball team used to say.

But that time upstairs in his sister’s house, with the Christmas tree lights blinking and the smell of fried chicken still in the air, some stupid TV show droning down in the family room—
Price Is Right
, it sounded like—and Sandy’s off-key voice singing “Hush little baby, don’t say a word,” it was almost like they were married, and that was their bedroom across the hall with the chenille spread all smoothed out and the big jar of Vaseline next to it on the nightstand, the two pairs of slippers lined up on the floor. It was almost like that was their wedding picture, not his sister’s, on the bureau, and the twins were theirs. Mark got this tremendous hard-on, just thinking about it, and when Sandy laid the baby down and turned around, he sort of fell into her arms.

Even then he can’t say he was so anxious to go all the way exactly, he just knew he had to. It was like a responsibility, part of being a family man, and it went with those beers in the refrigerator, the eagle-design bedspread and the file box on the kitchen counter, filled with proof-of-purchase panels from cereal boxes. After it was over he was a little surprised there wasn’t more to it. Later he bought a copy of
The Hite Report
to find out how many times a month most people did it. And when he and Sandy have done it three times in a week he sometimes feels like he has been let off the hook, knowing he can take a few nights off if he feels like it, or not take a few nights off, and be above average.

He always knew they’d be married sometime, though he wasn’t expecting Sandy to get pregnant when she did, in spring of junior year. He didn’t like his mother thinking Sandy was fast, thinking that was the only reason they got married. He wished he could’ve taken his diploma, taken the two-year auto mechanics course at the Manchester Technical Institute. He wished they could have had a real wedding like his sister’s, with Sandy in the long white gown.

But other than that, he was happy enough about the baby. He loved doing all that stuff like putting his head against her stomach and feeling it kick and making lists of names. (He told Sandy if it’s a boy what about George, for your father, but of course he was secretly happy when she said no, Mark Junior.) He loved fixing up their apartment. (Sandy has a touch, and could be an interior decorator, in his opinion, except of course she wants to stay home with the baby.) He didn’t mind how big her stomach got, even when they couldn’t make love anymore, by the ninth month. It was worth it, to walk down the street with his hand pressed against the small of her back and have everybody know he was the reason she had this enormous belly sticking out a full foot and a half in front, those (briefly) enormous breasts.

She made felt Christmas stockings with their names stitched in sequins. (She left the baby’s blank because he wouldn’t be born for another week.) Christmas morning she gave Mark a Swiss Army knife and a box of White Owl cigars to hand out after the baby was born, and a vest she’d made from a kit, orange and green crochet. He wore it to Christmas dinner at her folks’, to please her.

He gave her a kitten, which got run over by a car three weeks later. He also gave her a pressure cooker, which his mother said was one of the five most important ingredients to a good marriage, and a pink lacy nightgown to take with her to the hospital, and for a joke, a copy of
Playgirl
magazine with a bookmarker in the page where the foldout was. She didn’t understand it was supposed to be a joke and said, “Why would I want to look at that?” And even then she wouldn’t leave it alone. “That was a waste of a dollar-fifty,” she said later in the day. “When there are so many things we need.”

He came home one time (Mark Junior was born by now) and found her sitting around with her friends. They were all laughing in this high, hysterical way girls have when they get together. The minute he walked in they stopped.

The baby looks nothing like him. “Are you sure you’re the father?” his brother-in-law said (kidding). More than one person has called Mark Junior Sandy’s clone.

“Doesn’t Sandy know it’s more expensive to buy name brands?” his mother said one time when she stopped over with something for the baby. “The store brands taste just the same.” Also, she should defrost the refrigerator.

“So how’s the new man in your wife’s life?” said his mother-in-law when he ran into her at the post office. Mark had to think for a minute before he understood what she meant.

“Has she bought you an apron yet?” said Virgil. He and Jill dropped over one night on their way to a Bob Seger concert in Boston. Sandy was already asleep in their bed, with Mark Junior in her arms. The six-week period when they weren’t supposed to make love was over, but they still hadn’t done it. Virgil kept nuzzling his head against Jill, burrowing his face in her hair. They started to arm wrestle, and then he pinned her on the floor, kneeling down between her spread legs in tight jeans. Mark was afraid his face might be turning red, and went to get a cigarette.

His sister called him an old married man. When he picked up his son the baby cried. People started asking when they were going to have another one.

Sandy must have told Jill they weren’t doing it yet, because one day Virgil stopped him, said, “Must be getting pretty horny by now, huh?”

She left him with the baby for an afternoon, when she went for her postpartum checkup and to be fitted for a diaphragm. When she came home, with her mother—her mother was in on this—the two of them started that high-pitched laughing again. Evidently Mark had put the baby’s diaper on wrong, though he couldn’t see what was so humorous about that.